


Clock-wise Men

by sandonato



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Age Difference, Confused Harry Potter, Dysfunctional Relationships, Hogwarts Eighth Year, Infidelity, M/M, Older Harry Potter, One Shot, Time Travel, Unspeakable Draco Malfoy, hideouts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:53:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27060754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandonato/pseuds/sandonato
Summary: The thirty-first of March is the day Harry Potter comes tumbling down from the sky.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 2
Kudos: 30





	Clock-wise Men

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what this is exactly. I've been adding and deleting things. Editing. Just wanted to get it done and up. Thank you for reading.

The thirty-first of March is the day Harry Potter comes tumbling down from the sky. 

He falls and falls and falls; this is the second thing of great interest to take place that day.

The first is that Potter convinces the She-Weasel to get back together with him, aided in part by a sheepish, boyish smile and an expensive bouquet of lavender-coloured lilies. He waits outside the seventh year Transfigurations classroom and their reunion is a fantastic one, sure enough drawing the interest of many. They hug fantastically and kiss fantastically and gossip spreads fantastically, from eager mouth to eager mouth, no one aware that this much celebrated relationship between Potter and Weasley will last only one short-lived week. Draco does not come by this knowledge until later, though even then, it is more suspicion than solid knowing.

(I can’t tell you anything, Potter will say, later. Older and stubbled and tired of looking. Waiting. He’s stuck here. Draco will laugh in his face and say, Potty the Poof. A bit late for that, isn’t it?)

For this moment in March everyone believes that their love is an eternal one, now that they’re back together not in the on-off sense peculiar to that of wartime, but in the official, this-is-it sense, in the might-maybe-get-married-someday-if-you’ll-have-me-though-I’m-already-quite-certain-you-would sense. Draco himself is certain that the whole hullabaloo is a surprise to exactly no one, since last year Potter and his chit had both been spotted at a raucous inter-house party he’d pointedly not been invited to, huddled in a corner, just the two of them, aggressively sucking the living daylights out of each other’s mouth. Draco had heard all about it from a fourth year Gryffindor in the restricted section of the library - a tiny, frizzy-haired girl wearing too much lip-gloss. 

Oh, Anna. Oh, Anna. It’s proper romantic, isn’t it, she’d said, raising a dramatic hand to her forehead, too busy staring off into the distance to notice that Anna looked jealous and close to tears, and not like she thought it was romantic at all. In all my life I’ve never seen anything more perfect. Oh, Anna, have you?

Sat alone on his side of the Great Hall that night, Draco thinks they look anything but.

Potter is fitted seamlessly by She-Weasel’s side, shoulders broad and strong and capable, looking like some great knight that has come home and won back his faithless, wandering damsel at last. Girl-Weasley had had an eye on Finnigan while Potter tented desperately from place to place, but now her hands are in Potter’s and they are too busy talking to be eating, too busy floating in each other’s eyes, and Draco assumes that this is young love doing what it does best: ruining one of their appetite as well as the appetite of everyone else around them.

Draco uses his spoon to create lines and circles in his mashed potatoes, and assures himself very generously that he is not jealous – he is just. Just. Just incapable of understanding the need to always put such love on display. His parents had never kissed in front of him, or mooned with love-struck eyes or touched each other gently, or anything to that capacity. The most they’d ever done was call each other ‘darling’, doing so with voices that were significantly muted on the word. But that was then, before Voldemort’s fall and Father’s twenty year sentence and Mother’s seven year house arrest. Mother crying. Mother wandering from room to room. Draco in St. Mungos cleaning out bedpans during the summer. Malfoy, all the healers went, constantly. Step on it, lad, we’ve got another one. 

And Draco really isn’t in the mood to think about his parent’s stupid marriage tonight, or piles upon piles of shit. He’s in the mood for chicken basquaise. His irritation at his paltry plate of potatoes is irrational. His irritation climbs and climbs, up his skinny chest, until it’s peaked enough to drive him out of the Great Hall, and by time he’s got his wits about him, Draco’s already stomped out to the very edges of the lake, where it’s windy and cold and frankly a bit miserable to find oneself at, at an evening as annoying as this. Draco’s loneliness does not ease his anger any bit, unsatisfying a companion that it is in the first place, and he wants home. He wants a croque monsieur if, sweet boy, it’s too late for the elves to make a plate of chicken basquaise tonight. He wants Pansy beside him so badly he thinks he would give anything for it. Here with him and not in America getting married to some shriveled, wrinkled sugar daddy wanker, and Blaise’s laugh, maybe, and the many, ridiculous pocket watches he owned. And even Greg beside him would suffice.

Anyone.

Draco stands by the lake for a long while, furiously wanting things, staring morosely at his reflection in the water and dwelling on happier impossibilities. He has just gotten to thoughts of himself heroically pulling Vince out of the fire, or preventing him from making a fire in the first place, when the second thing of great interest that day happens.

Someone falls out of the sky.

They fall, and fall. And fall.

Draco gets over his surprise long enough to shout, more than a little frantically, Mobilicorpus!

In tense silence he watches the stranger begin to fall with less speed, but not slowly enough for them to not break all the bones in their body once they crash through the river surface. Is Mobilicorpus correct in this situation? Draco doesn’t quite know. Both 6th and 7th year are like fever dreams. He’s more deliberate with his studies this year but there’s so much Draco still does not understand. This person is falling. This person might die.

Mobilicorpus, Draco screams, at a loss for something better. Why the fuck isn’t this working? Mobilicorpus! Mobilicorpus!

(I’m bored, Potter will say, later. Let’s play exploding snap before you head to class. 

I’ve won seven rounds already, Draco will say. Merlin, you’re annoying. Is this payment for my sins, you think? McGonagall dumping you in a room with me?)

To his relief, things begin to slow down after Draco’s waved his wand the third time. A haphazardous plummet turns into a gradual, slow descent, and it is a long three minutes before the stranger lands safely on the other side of the lake, where grass begins to flow into trees. Wind is blowing his hair into his eyes and Draco runs an impatient hand through it, idly wishing he’d come out with a coat at least, or a scarf. Or simply done as Mother wanted and just let her cut it. If you want to look like a starved vagabond menace, she’d said at the gate of the manor, touching his luggage in goodbye then touching the back of his neck. By all means go ahead.

Draco peers closely through the fringe of his vagabond hair. From afar he can make out a man in short blue robes over wrinkled jeans, looking in desperate need of a shave and several ironing charms. He’s got a harried, fly-about sort of way to him, maybe from the falling and windy night combined, maybe just his natural mien. 

The man stops to wave. Draco does no such thing because he’s not an idiot. Instead he watches keenly as the stranger make his way over, cutting through night-time mist and long blades of grass, jumping gracefully over puddles and croaking frogs, until Draco comes face to face with a three inch taller Harry Potter. A broader one, too, wearing some ridiculous, eye-watering neon green t-shirt with red blazing letters across it.

 _READY TO RUMBLE!_ the neon monstrosity screams. _BABY!_

The silence is long. What do heroes do after hero-ing, Draco wonders. Drink beer? 

What comes out of his mouth is: A horrid amount of exclamation points, don't you think?

You can never have too many exclamation points, says Potter, standing so close Draco can feel his body heat, smell the sharpness of grass and condensation on him. Brilliant catch, there.

I’m well aware, Draco sniffs. He angles his chin in the direction of the castle. Weren’t you just – 

I’m sure I’m still there. Wherever ‘I’m just’.

When Potter says ‘wherever I’m just’, he looks at Draco with eyes that are laughing. Without glasses they are the most expressive thing on his face, the colour of all that field he’d just been sliding through. His nose is a little crooked (someone must have broken it again), his robes are a little jostled about, and Draco can tell from sight alone that he doesn’t have a wand on him. 

Draco can also tell that this man is an imposter. To keep his hands busy, he scratches at an eyebrow, clears his throat, then promptly changes his mind halfway because clearing his throat sounds much too loud in this small vacuum their bodies have created together. 

I saved your life, Potter.

Thank you. Would have been terribly inconveniencing to lose it.

The question is, why couldn’t you use your own magic to save yourself.

If you’re asking where my wand is, it’s not here.

I wasn’t. But assuming I did and that was your answer, where is it then?

Across the room I’ve just vanished from. And if it’s that far and you’re unexpectedly shot into the past, it’s quite hard to pick it along for the ride.

You’re from the future? Draco wants to know, noticing all the lines by the sides of Potter-Imposter’s eyes now. The ones that make him look friendly and aged and strangely muted, softer and mellower than that other one in the Great Hall. 

You certainly look different, Draco says.

Yeah?

Yes.

Different how?

You’ve lost that idiotic owl gaze, for one.

Must be the glasses.

I thought you'd blasted all our time turners to smithereens.

Ah, Potter-Imposter hums, strangely erudite-like. Potter has never seemed erudite a day in his life and it throws Draco off. He’s now sure, more than ever, that this must be someone else standing in front of him.

Do you believe that, Draco? 

Don’t call me that.

Your name?

Yes, Potter. My name.

My name is Harry, Potter-Imposter says. Middle name, James.

I can’t remember asking. 

Right, then. What I mean, _Draco_ , is that you should call me Harry.

(What I mean is that I can’t answer any of your questions, Potter will say, later, looking out the window so he won’t have to look Draco in the eye. So he won’t have to acknowledge that that morning he’d kissed Draco senseless. I just miss you, he’d said. But Potter's unwillingness to tell him what he wants to hear, to touch Draco where he wants to be touched, will make Draco angry, and so cruel in his anger Draco will laugh and say, before making his dramatic exit out of the room: Do you know what I think, Potter? I think you're shit at this. I’ve gleaned so far that you break up with Weasley and hook up with me. Apparently you want more than I’m willing to give you and I’m an Unspeakable leaving dangerous artifacts around whatever stupid flat we’re living in. I’m planning to break up with you, aren't I. And you assume I’m dipping my dick in places I shouldn't be so you nosed around my belongings like the arsehole we both know you are. Now you’re here. And you're stuck.

How am I doing so far, O Great One?)

Exactly how old are you?

112, Potter-Imposter says. But it’s hard to keep track after 85.

I say! If you don’t want to tell, ju – where are you _going_?

McGonagall’s.

Stop blundering about for a minute, then. Let me Disillusion you before we enter the castle.

The cicadas seem swept up in their own symphony tonight; they’re so loud Draco’s finding it hard to think in straight lines. Potter scratches at his day old stubble and smiles some more. Ah, he says twattily, when Draco’s all done blending him into the waning evening light, orange and then lavender, and then a deep, dark blue. Don’t worry, I won’t be here long. Someone’s coming for me.


End file.
